Some of you noticed that we thought maybe we’d have a conversation today about what we might learn from this whole semester. We didn’t get to that, but if you have thoughts or feedback or ideas or insights, we would love to have them. Comments welcome, or just edit ye olde wiki.

I created a shared Google Drive folder that you should all have access to. If you don’t have edit access, email me with your gmail handle and I’ll share the directory with you. Before we convene on May 12, your presentation should be in that directory.

A few of you have shown some interest in doing cool things with CartoDB — consider coming to this. I’m pretty sure that I have some $0 discount codes somewhere, too, so let me know if you need one of those.

To support our growing group of cartographers in newsrooms, we’re hosting a two-day conference in two weeks and you’re invited!

GeoJourNews is a two-day conference and hackday, focused on showcasing and building maps in news reporting and investigative journalism. We’d like to invite you and provide you with 90% discount passes for your colleagues and friends who might be interested!

Date: May 15, 2015Location: Parsons: The New SchoolHosts: CartoDB, Knight-Mozilla: Open News, and Parsons: The New School

Please share the event and the following discount code. If you can’t be in NYC you should share this with your friends and collaborators who will be!

Folks, we’ll add another post with pointers for the remaining groups, but since HUAC’s task list is fresh in my mind I wanted to get it posted. And…for all of you who are thinking about learning to code, this might be a helpful frame.

A lot of you are building out your HTML sites and using Bootstrap to manage the basic CSS. Bootstrap is an “HTML and CSS Framework” which just means that it provides you with a handful of really useful pre-defined CSS classes and definitions that you can use to make a good looking, responsive website. Continue reading →

If you’ve got a couple of different folks working on the same code base, you need some version control. Emailing files back and forth is not going to work for very long. Trust me. Git is a distributed version control system that allows multiple users to work on the same code and resolve conflicts (like two people editing the same file at the same time.) Even if it is just you, version control is your friend. This used to work, and then you did … something … and now it doesn’t? Roll back to the version that worked.

Git is a free and open protocol. Anyone can implement it. And there are people who will tell you that what makes git great is that it doesn’t depend on a central hub. Which is true. That is pretty cool. It is also more or less irrelevant to you because you are going to use a central hub. Probably github, that’s what most people use.